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“Crooked Trump” … Lock Him Up! … Lock Him Up! … Lock Him Up!

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: December 25, 2016, 06:40:14 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Donald Trump plans to shut down his charitable foundation,
which has been under scrutiny for months


The president-elect said in a statement on Saturday that he decided to shutter
his namesake charity before taking office next month. The Washington Post
has reported on cases in which Donald Trump apparently used foundation
money to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit businesses.


By MARK BERMAN and DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD | 4:28PM EST - Saturday, December 24, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump speaks to reporters this week at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks to reporters this week at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
 — Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.


PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump said he plans to shut down his charitable foundation, a decision that comes after repeated controversies over how it collected and disbursed funds.

In a statement on Saturday, Trump offered no timeline for when his foundation would close down, but said he had directed his attorney to take the steps needed to close the charity.

“The Foundation has done enormous good works over the years in contributing millions of dollars to countless worthy groups, including supporting veterans, law enforcement officers and children,” Trump said in the statement. “However, to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President I have decided to continue to pursue my strong interest in philanthropy in other ways.”

The Donald J. Trump Foundation has come under intense scrutiny this year after a series of reports in The Washington Post detailing its practices, including cases in which Trump apparently used the charity's money to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit businesses.

New York's attorney general has also been investigating the charity after some of these reports, and a spokeswoman for that office said the foundation could not officially shut down until that probe is over.

“The Trump Foundation is still under investigation by this office and cannot legally dissolve until that investigation is complete,” Amy Spitalnick, the spokeswoman, said in an email on Saturday.

The foundation is unusual in that it largely collects and donates money from other people. In fact, in the six years from 2009 to 2014, Trump told the Internal Revenue Service that he'd given his namesake foundation no money at all. The biggest donors in recent years were Vince and Linda McMahon, the pro-wrestling moguls, who gave the Trump Foundation $5 million between 2007 and 2009. Trump recently nominated Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration.

Trump said on Saturday that he was “very proud of the fact that the Foundation has operated at essentially no cost for decades, with 100% of the money going to charity.” The Trump Foundation has no paid employees and a board of five, consisting of Trump, three of his children and a longtime Trump Organization employee. They all work a half-hour per week, according to an IRS filing.

The president-elect added that “because I will be devoting so much time and energy to the Presidency and solving the many problems facing our country and the world, I don't want to allow good work to be associated with a possible conflict of interest.”

The foundation told the IRS it had $1.16 million in total assets by the end of 2015, the most recent tax filing available. A spokeswoman for Trump said they had no additional information on Saturday regarding where any remaining money might be sent.

Trump's foundation has admitted in IRS tax filings for 2015 that it violated a prohibition against “self-dealing” that says nonprofit leaders cannot use their charity's funds to help themselves, their relatives or their businesses.

In these tax filings, the charity checked “yes” in response to a question asking whether it had transferred any income or assets to “a disqualified person” — a description that could have meant Trump, a relative or a Trump-owned business.

Trump has not said what exactly he did to violate the rule, or what he has paid the IRS in penalty taxes as a result. The IRS has not commented when asked whether it was investigating the Trump Foundation.

Trump's charity has been prohibited from fundraising by the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, an action that came after The Washington Post reported that the foundation had failed to register with the state. This meant the foundation had dodged annual audits required in the state of New York.

Schneiderman's office is also investigating the Trump foundation after reports in The Post describing apparent cases of self-dealing that date back to 2007. The Trump Foundation spent $30,000 to buy two large portraits of Trump himself, including one that was hung up in the sports bar at a Trump-owned resort. Trump also appears to use $258,000 of his foundation's money — legally earmarked for charitable purposes — to settle lawsuits involving two of his for-profit clubs.

In addition, the Trump foundation gave a $25,000 gift to a campaign committee backing Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (Republican) even though nonprofits like the charity are not allowed to give political gifts. That gift was made as Bondi's office was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. Ultimately, Bondi's office did not pursue those allegations.

The move to shut down Trump's foundation, first reported on Saturday by The New York Times, comes as the president-elect and his family are facing intense questions regarding how they will avoid conflicts of interest while he is in the White House.

“The announcement that the Foundation will be shut down is a necessary first step for the incoming administration to avoid massive ethics problems, but it does not come close to ending the story,” said Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group aligned with allies of Hillary Clinton. The group's tips and research helped reveal some of the Trump foundation's apparent violations of the law.

In a statement, Bookbinder said that the Trump charity's “past instances of wrongdoing must be fully investigated” and called on the president-elect to “sell his businesses and take comprehensive steps to prevent conflicts of interest for him and his administration.”

Trump has said his two adults sons will run his company, but he has not provided details yet regarding how he will extricate himself from his complex network of businesses. He postponed a news conference this month meant to address the issue and has not rescheduled it yet.

In another case of Trump apparently trying to wrap up lingering questions and legal issues before he takes office, he agreed to settle fraud claims against his defunct Trump University real estate seminars. A federal judge this week gave preliminary approval to a deal in which Trump would pay $25 million as part of the settlement.

Earlier this week, Trump's eldest son, Eric, said he was suspending his charitable foundation after facing questions about whether donors could receive special access.

The Eric Trump Foundation, founded in 2007, raises more than $1.5 million a year through a golf tournament and other events, and it passes on the bulk of its money to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, a pediatric-cancer center in Memphis.

The president-elect was critical of the decision regarding his son's foundation, describing it as unfair in a pair of messages this week on Twitter.

“Isn't this a ridiculous shame?” the elder Trump wrote. “He loves these kids, has raised millions of dollars for them, and now must stop. Wrong answer!”


• Mark Berman covers national news for The Washington Post and anchors Post Nation, a destination for breaking news and stories from around the country.

• David A. Fahrenthold covered the 2016 presidential campaign for The Washington Post. He has been at The Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment, and the D.C. police.

__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • VIDEO: Trump says he plans to shut down his charitable foundation

 • GRAPHIC: Searching for evidence of Trump's personal giving

 • Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on ‘self-dealing’, new filing to IRS shows

 • Trump boasts about his philanthropy. But his giving falls short of his words.

 • Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money

 • How a Univision anchor found the missing $10,000 portrait that Trump bought with his charity’s money

 • Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems

 • Trump bought a 6-foot-tall portrait of himself with charity money. We may have found it.

 • Three of the mysteries in the files of the Donald J. Trump Foundation have been solved. Here's what we know.

 • How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people's money

 • Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general

 • Trump promised personal gifts on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’. Here's who really paid.

 • Donald Trump used money donated for charity to buy himself a Tim Tebow-signed football helmet

 • Trump promised millions to charity. We found less than $10,000 over 7 years.

 • Trump camp says $25,000 charity contribution to Florida AG was a mistake


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/12/24/donald-trump-plans-to-shut-down-his-charitable-foundation-which-has-been-under-scrutiny-for-months
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #1 on: December 25, 2016, 06:41:29 pm »


Click on the link down the bottom of the article to open the original at The Washington Post, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and read the comments posted. Use the drop-down menu to select “Oldest First”, then start reading from the top. It's good to see there are still plenty of honest, intelligent folks in the USA as opposed to the stupid boofheads who support Trump and corruption!

I hope their statute of limitations on Trump's corruption offences doesn't run out until after the next presidential election. It'd be good to see him banged up in jail after the next president appoints a special prosecutor to investigate Trump's corruption offences, then proceeds to prosecute him for them.
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Im2Sexy4MyPants
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WWW
« Reply #2 on: December 27, 2016, 10:39:00 am »

haha i hope trump destroys the lying washington pissing post

lucky no one believe the lying media any more

or look where hillary ends up

« Last Edit: December 27, 2016, 10:58:10 am by Im2Sexy4MyPants » Report Spam   Logged

Are you sick of the bullshit from the sewer stream media spewed out from the usual Ken and Barby dickless talking point look a likes.

If you want to know what's going on in the real world...
And the many things that will personally effect you.
Go to
http://www.infowars.com/

AND WAKE THE F_ _K UP
Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #3 on: December 28, 2016, 10:26:45 am »


from The Washington Post....

On Twitter, Trump defends foundation, ignores legal controversy surrounding it

The president-elect said the media had not given him enough credit for his generosity,
but he made no mention of allegations that he violated a “self-dealing” provision.


By DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD and JOHN WAGNER | 10:29AM EST - Tuesday, December 27, 2016

President-Elect Donald Trump talks to members of the media after a meeting with military leadership at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday, December 21st, 2016. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
President-Elect Donald Trump talks to members of the media after a meeting with military leadership at the Mar-a-Lago club
in Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday, December 21st, 2016. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump took to Twitter on Monday night to defend the charitable foundation he has pledged to close, saying the media had not given him enough credit for his generosity and ignoring the legal issues that ensnared the organization in controversy.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation has come under intense scrutiny this year after reports in The Washington Post detailing its practices, including cases in which Trump apparently used the charity's money to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit businesses.

New York's attorney general is investigating the charity, and a spokeswoman for that office said on Saturday that the foundation could not officially shut down until that probe is over. Among the issues at hand is whether Trump violated a “self-dealing” provision that says nonprofit leaders cannot use their charity's funds to help themselves, their relatives or their businesses.

“I gave millions of dollars to DJT Foundation, raised or recieved millions more, ALL of which is given to charity, and media won't report!” Trump said in one Monday night tweet.

“The DJT Foundation, unlike most foundations, never paid fees, rent, salaries or any expenses. 100% of money goes to wonderful charities!” the president-elect said in another.

Trump and his companies gave about $6 million to his foundation since its launch in 1987, according to tax filings. The most recent tax filings go up to the end of 2015.

Other people have collectively given about $9.5 million. The biggest outside donors were Vince and Linda McMahon, two pro-wrestling moguls, who gave the Trump Foundation $5 million between 2007 and 2009. Trump recently nominated Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration.

Trump himself gave nothing to his foundation between 2009 and 2014, according to filings. His businesses contributed in 2015 for the first time in several years.

Experts on charities say it's rare for the founder of a private, name-branded foundation to give nothing to his own foundation while relying entirely on donations from others. That anomaly allowed Trump to take advantage of the idea that the money in the foundation was his.

Trump's donations to his foundation are also small, by the standards of billionaires' philanthropy.

Filmmaker George Lucas, for instance, who is tied with Trump at 324th place in Forbes's list of the world's billionaires, donated $925 million to his family foundation in 2012. In 2014, Lucas's foundation gave out $55 million in donations to museums, hospitals, artistic groups and environmental charities.

While much of the Trump foundation's money has gone to charity, there are some high-profile exceptions.

In 2013, the Trump foundation gave a $25,000 gift to a campaign committee backing Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (Republican) even though nonprofits like the charity are not allowed to give political gifts.

That gift was made as Bondi's office was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. A consultant who worked on Bondi's re-election effort has said that Bondi was not aware of the allegations when she solicited the donation from Trump. Ultimately, Bondi's office did not pursue the fraud allegations.

Trump also reported using foundation money to buy items for himself, which runs afoul of federal tax law.

The Trump Foundation spent $30,000 to buy two large portraits of Trump himself, including one that was hung up in the sports bar at a Trump-owned resort. Trump also appears to have used $258,000 of his foundation's money — legally earmarked for charitable purposes — to settle lawsuits involving two of his for-profit clubs.

The office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (Democrat) announced its investigation of the Trump Foundation after reports in The Washington Post described such apparent cases of self-dealing that date back to 2007.

Trump's foundation has admitted in IRS tax filings for 2015 that it violated a prohibition against “self-dealing” that says nonprofit leaders cannot use their charity's funds to help themselves, their relatives or their businesses.

In these tax filings, the charity checked “yes” in response to a question asking whether it had transferred any income or assets to “a disqualified person” — a description that could have meant Trump, a relative or a Trump-owned business.

Trump has not said what exactly he did to violate the rule, or what he has paid the IRS in penalty taxes as a result. The IRS has not commented when asked whether it was investigating the Trump Foundation.

The New York attorney general's investigation is unlikely to lead to any kind of criminal charge. Instead, Trump may be required to repay his foundation the money it spent to help him, and he may have to personally pay penalty taxes worth 10 percent or more of the value of the self-dealing transactions.

Trump's tweet was correct in that his foundation has low overhead. It has no paid staff, and only a five-member board. It also has spent almost nothing on legal fees, raising the question of whether the organization was aware of the legal problems it created.


• David A. Fahrenthold covers the 2016 presidential campaign for The Washington Post. He has been at The Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment, and the D.C. police.

• John Wagner is a national political reporter covering the White House for The Washington Post.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Trump Hotels has had its eye on China — but the door hasn't opened

 • Donald Trump plans to shut down his charitable foundation, which has been under scrutiny for months

 • VIDEO: Trump says he plans to shut down his charitable foundation

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Here's a look at Trump's administration so far


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/on-twitter-trump-defends-foundation-ignores-legal-controversy-surrounding-it/2016/12/27/7ec20b02-cc39-11e6-a87f-b917067331bb_story.html
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #4 on: December 30, 2016, 08:40:48 pm »


from The Washington Post....

David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story
of his year covering Trump


This Washington Post journalist asked what he thought was a simple question: What happened
to the $6 million Donald Trump raised for veterans during his campaign? That began the
reporter's strange journey to track down an “orange” portrait, receive a hot tip about
a vulgar conversation and write a story that he thought would never be published.


By DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD | 8:00AM EST - Thursday, December 29, 2016

Photograph illustration of David Fahrenthold by Bill O'Leary.
Photograph illustration of David Fahrenthold by Bill O'Leary.

“ARNOLD and Tim, if you'd come up, we’re going to give you a nice, beautiful check,” Donald Trump said. He held up an oversize check, the kind they give to people who win golf tournaments. It was for $100,000. In the top-left corner the check said: “The Donald J. Trump Foundation.”

Along the bottom, it had the slogan of Trump's presidential campaign: “Make America Great Again.”

This was in February.

The beginning of it.

Trump was in Waterloo, Iowa, for a caucus-day rally at the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center — named for five local siblings who had been assigned to the same Navy cruiser in World War II. They all died when the ship went down at Guadalcanal.

Trump had stopped his rally to do something presidential candidates don't normally do. He was giving away money.

Arnold and Tim, whom he had called to the stage, were from a local veterans group. Although their big check had Trump's name on it, it wasn't actually Trump's money. Instead, the cash had been raised from other donors a few days earlier, at a televised fundraiser that Trump had held while he skipped a GOP debate because of a feud with Fox News.

Trump said he had raised $6 million that night, including a $1 million gift from his own pocket. Now Trump was giving it, a little at a time, to charities in the towns where he held campaign events.

“See you in the White House,” one of the men said to Trump, leaving the stage with this check that married a nonprofit's name and a campaign's slogan.

“He said, ‘We'll see you in the White House’.” Trump repeated to the crowd. “That's nice.”

After that, Trump lost Iowa.

He won New Hampshire.

Then he stopped giving away money.

But as far as I could tell, just over $1.1 million had been given away. Far less than what Trump said he raised. And there was no sign of the $1 million Trump had promised from his own pocket.

So what happened to the rest of the money?

It sounded like an easy question that the Trump campaign could answer quickly. I thought I'd be through with the story in a day or two.

I was wrong.

That was the start of nine months of work for me, trying to dig up the truth about a part of Trump's life that he wanted to keep secret. I didn't understand — and I don't think Trump understood, either — where that one check, and that one question, would lead.


I'VE been a reporter for The Washington Post since 2000, covering everything from homicide scenes in the District to Congress to the World Championship Muskrat Skinning Contest. (People race to see who skins a dead muskrat the fastest. There's also a beauty pageant. Some women compete in both.)

By the time I got to that Trump event in Waterloo, I'd been covering the 2016 presidential election for 13 months, since the last weeks of 2014. But I had the track record of a mummy's curse: Just about every campaign I had touched was dead.

I had, for instance, covered former New York governor George Pataki's (failed) attempt to get people to recognize him in a New Hampshire Chipotle. Pataki dropped out. I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyoncé. Huckabee condemned me. Then he dropped out, too.

I went to St. Louis to write about a speech given by former Texas governor Rick Perry. In the middle of the speech, Perry dropped out.

So by the time the New Hampshire primaries were over, the candidates I had covered were kaput. I needed a new beat. While I pondered what that would be, I decided to do a short story about the money Trump had raised for veterans.

I wanted to chase down two suspicions I'd brought home with me from that event in Iowa. For one thing, I thought Trump might have broken the law by improperly mixing his foundation with his presidential campaign. I started calling experts.

“I think it's pretty clear that that's over the line,” Marc S. Owens, the former longtime head of the Internal Revenue Service's nonprofit division, told me when I called him.

Then Owens kept talking, and the story started deflating.

In theory, Owens said, nonprofit groups like the Trump Foundation are “absolutely prohibited” from participating or intervening in a political campaign. But, he said, if the IRS did investigate, it wouldn't likely start until the Trump Foundation filed its paperwork for 2016. Which wouldn't be until late 2017. Then an agent would open a case. There went 2018. Finally, Owens said, the IRS might take action: It might even take away the Trump Foundation's tax-exempt status.

In 2019. Or maybe not ever.

Owens doubted that the IRS — already under scrutiny from the GOP-run Congress after allegations it had given undue scrutiny to conservative groups — would ever pick a fight with Trump.

“I don't think anything's going to happen” to Trump, Owens said. “But, theoretically, it could.”

My other suspicion was that Trump was still sitting on the bulk of the money he had raised for veterans — including the $1 million he had promised from himself.

I asked Trump's people to account for all this money. They didn't.

Then, finally, I got a call.

“The money is fully spent,” Corey Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, told me in late May. “Mr. Trump's money is fully spent.”

But, Lewandowski told me, the details of Trump’s $1 million in gifts were secret. He wouldn't say which groups Trump had donated to. Or when. Or in what amounts.

This was an important assertion — that Trump had delivered on a signature campaign promise — made without proof. I didn't want to just take Lewandowksi's word for it.

So I tried to prove him right.

I spent a day searching for Trump's money on Twitter, asking vets' organizations if they'd gotten any of it. I used Trump's Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, because I wanted Trump to see me searching.

Trump saw.

The next night, he called me to say he had just then given away the $1 million, all in one swoop, to a nonprofit run by a friend. That meant when Lewandowski said Trump's money was “fully spent,” it was actually still in Trump's pocket.

On the phone, I asked Trump: Would you really have given this money away if I hadn't been asking about it?

“You know, you're a nasty guy,” he said. “You're really a nasty guy.”


VIDEO: Meet the ‘nasty’ reporter who got Trump to donate $1 million

A few days later, Trump held a news conference in Trump Tower, where he answered my other question. Where was the remainder of the money Trump had raised from other donors, four months earlier? Turns out, it had been sitting in the Trump Foundation, unspent. In this news conference, Trump announced that he had given the last of it away — and he lashed out at the media for asking him to account for the money.

“Instead of being like, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Trump’, or ‘Trump did a good job’, everyone said : ‘Who got it? Who got it? Who got it?’ And you make me look very bad,” Trump said. “I have never received such bad publicity for doing such a good job.”

Because my stories had led to this angry moment, I was on “Morning Joe” and CNN and Lawrence O'Donnell. The New York Times and Le Monde referenced my work. My dad wrote to say how proud he was of me. I read pundits predicting that the presidential race itself would change. They said the old trope about Trump — that he was a Teflon candidate, immune to accountability — was now disproved.

When I came home from my last TV hit, the kids, ages 4 and 5 months, were asleep. The house was quiet. I was still full of caffeine and do-gooder energy and decided to tidy up.

Among the clutter on the coffee table, I found my 4-year-old’s Party Popper, a bright yellow gun that fired confetti. For some reason, I held the gun up to my eye and looked down the barrel, the way Yosemite Sam always does.

It looked unloaded.

Then, for some reason, I pulled the trigger.

When I got to the ER, I had a swollen face, metal-foil confetti in my hair and a faint odor of gun smoke. Finally, the doctor could see me.

“I shot myself in the eye with a glitter gun,” I said. I showed him the Party Popper, which I had brought with me, in case he wanted to send it off to the National Institute of Morons for further study.


I GOT HOME from the hospital with a scratched cornea and a tube of eye ointment. The next day, with some of my dignity permanently lost, I got started on a bigger story.

The idea for this story had come from our executive editor, Marty Baron. One night, as we both waited for an elevator, Marty offered a suggestion.

Why don't you go beyond Trump's promises to give to veterans, he said, and look at Trump's giving to charity, period?

The logic was that Trump had just tried to wiggle out of a charitable promise he'd made on national TV. What, Marty wondered, had he been doing before the campaign, when nobody was looking?

That reporting process started with a lot of paper.

Working with one of The Washington Post's ace researchers, Alice Crites, I went digging for records that would reveal Trump's charitable giving, going back to his early days as a Manhattan developer in the 1980s. We looked at old news clippings, detailing Trump's public statements. And we looked at tax filings from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which had been dug out of storage by New York state.

Those two sources told two very different stories.

In the news clippings, you could see that Trump had repeatedly made public promises to donate to charity. In the 1980s, for instance, Trump had promised to give away $4 million from sales of his book “The Art of the Deal”. In more recent years, he said he would give away $2.5 million he made off “The Apprentice”. And donated the profits from Trump University. All told, the pledges in those news clips made it seem that Trump had given away more than $12 million.

In more recent clippings, in fact, Trump's presidential campaign staff said his actual giving had been far higher than that: “tens of millions” over his lifetime.

The state's records showed something else.

They showed that the Trump Foundation — which Trump had set up to give away his own money — had received only a total of $5.5 million from Trump since 1987.

So where was all that other money that he said he had been donating?

“We want to keep them private. We want to keep them quiet,” Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of Trump's business, had told me about the missing money. “He doesn't want other charities to see it. Then it becomes like a feeding frenzy.”

Once again, I didn't want to take his word for it.

So I set out — using Twitter — to try to prove Trump right.

I started making a list of charities I thought were most likely to have received money from Trump's own pocket. Nonprofits that had received donations from the Trump Foundation. Charities whose galas Trump had attended. Causes he'd praised on Twitter.

In each case, I called the charity and asked if it had ever received a donation from Trump — and, if so, when. Then, I wrote the charity's name and its response on a legal pad and posted pictures of the legal pad to Twitter.

My list started to grow: 100 charities. 150. 200.

In all those calls, a pattern began to emerge. In the years between 2008 and 2015 — when Trump wasn't giving money to the Trump Foundation — he didn't seem to have given much to other people's charities, either. The only gift I could find in that range was from 2009, when he was credited with giving less than $10,000 to the Police Athletic League of New York City.




250 charities.

As the circus of the 2016 campaign swirled around me — Twitter beefs, Trump's criticisms of a Gold Star family and a Mexican American federal judge — I stayed focused on this small slice of Trump's life. After a while, my 4-year-old daughter started talking about the Trump Foundation at dinner, just because her parents talked about nothing else. “He should give the money to the people, so the people get the money,” she said. “It's not nice.”

I called 300 charities.

325.

This story started to remind me of one of the weirdest stories I've ever done: a 2014 tale about the federal government's giant paperwork cave.

The cave was about 45 minutes north of Pittsburgh. The Office of Personnel Management kept federal employees’ personnel records in 28,000 file cabinets inside the caverns of an abandoned limestone mine. There were 600 federal employees down there. Cave clerks. Their job was to assemble and collate paperwork from the caverns and use that paperwork to compute how much individual federal employees would receive in benefits when they retired. The cave clerks worked in an absurdist parody of government inefficiency, which was as slow in 2014 as it was in the 1970s.

In reporting jargon, I'd tried the front door: I asked to tour the mine. OPM said no. So then I went looking for windows. I sought out ex-employees, who had firsthand knowledge of the place but weren't beholden to OPM's desire for secrecy.

I found them. By piecing together their recollections, I got the story that the government didn't want me to find.

Now Trump himself was the abandoned limestone mine.

If he wouldn't tell me what he had given away, I'd try to find the answer anyway — by talking to charities with firsthand knowledge of what he had given.

When I reached No.325 on my list, I yanked on a window, and it gave.


VIDEO: How Donald Trump directed millions to his foundation

“They ended up purchasing a Michael Israel portrait of Donald Trump,” said Matthew Ladika, the CEO of a Florida children's charity called HomeSafe.

I had called this charity — which I knew had received $20,000 from the Trump Foundation — to ask if it had ever received anything else, from Trump's own pocket. It had not. But Ladika told me something I didn't expect: the reason for that $20,000 gift from Trump's charity.

Trump had used it to buy a portrait of himself.

The portrait had been painted by a “speed painter,” who was the entertainment at a charity gala at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club. Melania Trump bought it for $20,000. But then, later, Trump paid for it with a check from the Trump Foundation.

That raised a new set of questions. Tax law prohibits “self-dealing,” which is when charity leaders use their nonprofits' money to buy things for themselves. If Trump hung that portrait on the wall at one of his resorts, for instance, he'd be breaking the law. So where was the portrait now?

I asked Trump's people. They didn't respond.

I tried a Google Images search, feeding it a photo of the portrait, which showed Trump's painted face.

“Best guess for this image: Orange,” Google said.

I got a screen full of oranges. Orange juice. Orange Julius. No portraits.

I kept looking, posting details of my search to Twitter. Soon I had attracted a virtual army, ready to join the scavenger hunt. I had begun the year with 4,700 Twitter followers. By September I had more than 60,000 and climbing fast. I began hearing from celebrities and even a few personal heroes, offering their assistance out of the blue. The barbecue columnist for Texas Monthly — an idol to me, as a journalist and a native Texan — was watching videos of other people's parties taken at a Trump golf resort. He thought he'd spotted the painting in the background (he hadn't). Kathy Griffin, the actress, called me with her memories about visiting the set of Trump's “The Celebrity Apprentice”. Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner, was sending me links on Twitter, new leads on Trump promises.

That army — almost all of them strangers to me — never found the first portrait. But soon there was a new target and a new scavenger hunt.

“Google ‘Havi Art Trump’,” said a strange voice on the phone one day, calling from the 561 area code. Palm Beach, Florida.

I did.

The Google search revealed a new portrait of Trump. This one was four feet tall, painted by Miami artist Havi Schanz. After a phone call, I confirmed that Trump had purchased it in 2014 at a charity auction run by the Unicorn Children's Foundation. Once again, he had the Trump Foundation pay the bill.

I needed to find that portrait. I turned to my Twitter followers, putting out a photo of the new $10,000 portrait.

That was at 10:34 a.m.




By early evening I knew where it was.

“The Havi Painting was at Doral National in Miami, you can see two separate pics that tourists have taken of it,” wrote Allison Aguilar.

I've never met Aguilar. I learned later that she is a former HR manager who is now a stay-at-home mother in Atlanta, writing short stories on the side. Days before, looking for the $20,000 portrait, she had scoured the website for Trump's golf resort at Doral, in Florida, scanning more than 500 user-generated photos of the resort;s rooms, restaurants and golf course.

About halfway through, she had spotted another portrait in a photo, hanging on a wall at the resort.

Then she saw my tweet, saying that I was now looking for that portrait, too.

“Oh, now that I've seen,” Aguilar remembered thinking.

The TripAdvisor photo she found was dated February 2016.

Was the portrait still there?

The answer was provided by another stranger.

Enrique Acevedo, an anchor at the Spanish-language network Univision, saw my tweet that night, broadcasting that Aguilar had traced the portrait to Doral. Acevedo realized that Doral was just a few blocks from the Univision studios. He booked a room for that night.

“I used points,” Acevedo said. “I didn't want to … spend any money on Trump's property, so I used points.” After his newscast ended, Acevedo checked in and started quizzing the late-night cleaning crews.

“Have you seen this picture?” he asked. “They said, ‘Oh yeah, it's downstairs’.”

Bingo. Acevedo found the $10,000 portrait, paid for with charity money, hanging on the wall of the resort's sports bar.

“Hey @Fahrenthold just checked and the portrait is still hanging at the Champions Lounge. How much did you say it cost the Trump Foundation?” he wrote on Twitter that night.




All of that — from my first request for help to Acevedo's discovery — had taken less than 14 hours. Together, we had discovered Trump doing exactly what the law said he couldn't do: using his charity's money to decorate his resort.

A Trump spokesman later offered the explanation that the resort was actually doing the foundation a favor, by storing its art free of charge. Tax experts were not impressed by this reasoning.

“It's hard to make an IRS auditor laugh,” one told me. “But this would do it.”


ON A MORNING in October, a month before Election Day, a window opened itself.

I got a phone call. It was a source, with a video.

The first few seconds were jumpy footage of a bus, lumbering through a bland Hollywood backlot. The soundtrack was indistinct mumbling. But then there was Trump's voice.

“I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down in Palm Beach. I moved on her. And I failed. I'll admit it,” he was saying. “I did try and f--- her. She was married.”

That was 17 seconds in.

On the bus were Trump and “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush. The video, I figured out, had been shot in 2005. The two men were visiting the set of NBC's “Days of Our Lives”, where Trump was to make a cameo appearance. In a blaze of network synergy, NBC's “Access Hollywood” was there to see Trump arrive. Trump and Bush were wearing hot microphones.

On the bus, Trump told Bush about trying and failing to seduce a woman in Palm Beach. (“I took her out furniture shopping,” he said.)

Trump also described how he kissed and groped women, without asking first.

“And when you're a star, they let you do it!” Trump said. The thing that stood out to me was the genuine wonder in his voice. He seemed to be saying: I can't believe it either, but the world lets you get away with this.

This was not the first time Trump had been recorded having lewd conversations. BuzzFeed, in particular, had found tapes of Trump talking about women with shock jock Howard Stern. (“You could've gotten her, right? You could've nailed her,” Stern asked him once about Princess Diana, who at the time had recently died. “I think I could have,” Trump said.) But those had been excused, by some, because they were just words. Trump, it seemed, was playing an outrageous version of himself in public, for the entertainment of Stern and his audience.

But this video was different. This was Trump talking, in private, about his own conduct: how, when and why he groped women. It was not a story about words. It was about Trump's actions, which these words revealed for the first time.

I first made myself into Paul Revere of the cubicles, raising alarms around the newsroom and setting people in motion. The Washington Post's video team started to edit, transcribe and subtitle the footage. They told me they would be ready to post a version of the video at about 3:30 p.m. That was my deadline.

I called NBC to see if they thought the video was a hoax. I reached out to a spokeswoman for Billy Bush and a publicist for Arianne Zucker, the soap-opera actress in the video who escorted Trump and Bush around the studio. And I reached out to Trump's spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. I sent her the transcript of the video. I asked:

“1. Does Mr. Trump have any reason to believe that it is not authentic, and that he did not say these things? 2. Does Mr. Trump recall that conversation? If so, does he believe there is anything that was *not* captured in this transcript that would make him look better? 3. Does Mr. Trump have any regrets about this conversation?”

Nobody answered right away.

In the meantime, I had to start writing. The story was easy to compose, since much of it was simply repeating what Trump had said. The only problem was the bad words.

The Washington Post is a fairly fusty place when it comes to profanity. If a reporter tries to get a bad word into a story, the word is usually forwarded to top editors, who consider it with the gravity and speed that the Vatican applies to candidates for sainthood. That unwieldy system assumed that bad words would attack one at a time, like bad guys in a kung-fu movie.

But in this story, we were dealing with a whole army of bad words at once. The system was overloaded. When Trump said, “Grab 'em by the p----,” for instance, the editors weren't sure people would be able to guess right away what “p----” was. They added a letter at the end: “p---y.”

Other words required a ruling from the bosses.

“Go find out about ‘tits’!” I heard one editor tell another, while the story was being edited — Trump had used the word in criticizing a woman's appearance. The second editor left to find a higher-ranking editor who could make a ruling. “‘Tits’ is all right,” he said when he returned.

At this point, 3:30 p.m. was getting closer.

We didn't get any on-the-record response from NBC, Bush or Zucker.

Then we heard from Trump's spokeswoman.

She'd read the transcript. She said: That doesn't sound like Mr. Trump. She wanted to see the video. We sent it to them at 3:50 p.m., with a warning that we would publish the story soon — with or without their comment.

Then nothing. Our lawyers and editors were satisfied that the tape was legitimate and newsworthy. The story was edited and ready to go. 4 p.m. arrived. Terri Rupar, the national digital editor, was walking to her desk to hit the button and publish it without comment from Trump.

I yelled for Terri to stop.

Trump was admitting it.

“This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended,” he said in a statement that arrived at that moment.

The story was published at 4:02 p.m. It became the most-read story of all time on The Washington Post's website, easily surpassing the past champion, a tale about a woman from Burundi who was believed dead but returned to crash her own funeral. At one point, more than 100,000 people were simultaneously reading the story about the video. The servers that measure The Post's Web traffic actually broke because there was too much traffic.

Afterward, Trump's deficit in polling averages increased, from a little over 3 points to more than 5 points. Prominent Republicans turned to denounce him. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) said he was “sickened.”

Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, was whisked out of a campaign event — viewing a collection of autographed cardboard hot-dog buns in Toledo — without comment.

Trump himself made a second, more thorough apology in a 90-second Facebook video later that evening. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” he said.

I had to buy another suit, for TV appearances. My daughter, now fully over the idea that her father was on TV, began complaining when I came on and she had to switch off “Peppa Pig”. I had to quit doing the cooking at home. (Nobody complained about that.)

On Twitter I watched myself become a minor celebrity — all because of a story that had, essentially, fallen into my lap.

“My wife says that David @Fahrenthold is a time traveler from the future trying to carefully fix the darkest timeline. I believe her,” wrote James Church, a professor at Austin Peay State University.

And, after I appeared on Fox News Channel to talk about the story, I heard from a man in Milwaukee. He called The Washington Post but couldn't say “Fahrenthold” in a way that the voice-mail system recognized.

He wound up in the voice-mail box of another reporter in Sports.

“I wanna kill him,” the caller said of me. “Thank you.”

The Washington Post took this seriously. I met with the D.C. police and the FBI, and a security consultant the paper hired. She was a congenial woman, a former counterterrorism official. When she arrived at our house she terrified us far more than the actual death threat had.

“Your cars are parked too far away for a car bomb,” she said, looking out the front windows at the street. “They'll probably cut your brake lines.” She recommended having a car patrol the neighborhood. She recommended a safe room.

She recommended stocking the safe room with provisions, in case we were under siege so long that we needed snacks.

I had to get back to work. My wife — who hadn't complained about any of this, the long hours or the missed bedtimes or the early-morning TV appearances — stopped me, shaken at what I'd gotten us into.

When the leaked Trump video still seemed to have swung the 2016 campaign, I was interviewed by a German reporter, who asked, “Do you have the feeling … ‘This is it, this is the peak of my career?’”


THE POINT OF my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he?

By the end of the election, I felt I'd done my job. My last big story about Trump started with an amazing anecdote, which came from a tip from a reader. In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.

He sat there through the whole ceremony, singing along with the choir of children as cameras snapped, and then left without giving a dime.

“All of this is completely consistent with who Trump is,” Tony Schwartz, Trump's co-author on his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal”, told me. “He's a man who operates inside a tiny bubble that never extends beyond what he believes is his self-interest.”

“If your worldview is only you — if all you're seeing is a mirror — then there's nobody to give money to,” Schwartz said. “Except yourself.”


ELECTION DAY came. I thought my time with Trump had come to an end.

That night, my job was to co-write the main Web story about the election. My colleague Matea Gold and I were supposed to pre-write stories for all the likely outcomes. I volunteered to write the one that said “Trump wins”.

Based on the polling data, it felt fantastical and pointless, like designing a Super Bowl ring for the Cleveland Browns.

“Biggest upset of the modern era?” I asked Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz, trying to use the right tone in this story that nobody would ever read. Balz said that was right.

Then the polls started to close.

And it turned out that I am not a time traveler.

About 10 p.m., as the tide turned against Clinton, the editors started killing or reshaping stories they had assigned hours before. They axed CLINTON, a story about the history Clinton would make as the first woman to win the White House. They ordered a rewrite of GOP, which was supposed to tell readers how — with Trump defeated — the GOP was licking its wounds and looking ahead to 2020. Across the newsroom, paragraphs were being deleted en masse. An entire presupposed version of the future was disappearing. It wasn't the future after all.

Finally, at 2:32 a.m., the Associated Press called Wisconsin.

Trump was over the top.

PUB TRUMP WINS STORY”, I wrote to the editors, giving the order to publish the story I'd written earlier.

“Donald John Trump has been projected as the winner of the presidential election, according to the Associated Press. … His victory on Tuesday was the biggest surprise of the modern presidential era. ...”


Donald “The Joker” Trump holding a Trump Mask. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
Donald “The Joker” Trump holding a Trump Mask. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.

THAT NIGHT, I arrived home about 4 a.m. to a quiet house. I found a stale beer in the back of the fridge.

In the past, I'd always been able to step out of my job at times like this.

No matter how big the day's story was, there was always a bigger world, which was still spinning unaffected by the murder I'd covered in Northeast Washington or the natural disaster or the congressional vote I'd just witnessed. But this story was too big to step out of.

As I sat on the couch with my nasty pale ale, it occurred to me that I would be living in the story, from that point on.

A few days later, I was interviewed by another German reporter. He asked if these past nine months, the greatest adventure in my life as a journalist, had been for naught.

“Do you feel like your work perhaps did not matter at all?” he said.

I didn't feel like that.

It did matter. But, in an election as long and wild as this, a lot of other stories and other people mattered, too. I did my job. The voters did theirs. Now my job goes on. I'll seek to cover Trump the president with the same vigor as I scrutinized Trump the candidate.

And now I know how to do it.


• David A. Fahrenthold covers the 2016 presidential campaign for The Washington Post. He has been at The Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment, and the D.C. police.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • Searching for evidence of Trump's personal giving

 • After series of Washington Post stories, Trump says he will shut down his troubled foundation

 • Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahrenthold-tells-the-behind-the-scenes-story-of-his-year-covering-trump/2016/12/27/299047c4-b510-11e6-b8df-600bd9d38a02_story.html
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« Reply #5 on: February 18, 2017, 12:42:57 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Trump said he would isolate his family businesses,
but they have already seeped into the White House


By NOAH BIERMAN and JOSEPH TANFANI | 11:40AM PST - Friday, February 17, 2017

President Trump stands with his wife first lady Melania Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, inside of the inaugural parade reviewing stand in front of the White House on January 20th, 2017. — Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
President Trump stands with his wife first lady Melania Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, inside of the
inaugural parade reviewing stand in front of the White House on January 20th, 2017. — Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.


TWENTY-FOUR HOURS before taking the oath of office, President Trump strutted into the presidential ballroom of the Trump International Hotel to toast congressional leaders, top donors and the people he had picked to fill out his Cabinet.

Trump joked that “a total genius must have built this place,” underscoring the message: He would make little effort to separate his presidency from his identity as a business tycoon.

Less than a month in, his intentions are even clearer. The ethics firewall built by Trump's attorneys already has failed to prevent complications from his family's businesses from seeping into the presidency.

A top aide was scolded by the government ethics office and the GOP oversight chairman for pitching daughter Ivanka Trump's fashion line on television, after Trump and another aide attacked Nordstrom for dropping her brand. Another business, Trump's Florida country club, drew bipartisan security concerns after Trump appeared to discuss a North Korean missile test with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in full view of club members on a dining patio.

And Trump's sons have prompted deep concern from ethics watchdogs as they pursue plans to launch a new U.S. hotel chain, possibly with the help of money from foreign investors, that ultimately will create profits for the president.

“They don't seem to have any safeguards,” said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, who serves on the board of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a watchdog group that has sued the Trump administration, alleging ethics violations.

Trump is probably the wealthiest businessman to serve as president, and the first without government or military experience. His success in branding and building hotels, casinos and a media business brought him to prominence, and many of his supporters see that experience as his most valuable asset.

But the Trump Organization, with real estate deals all over the world, presents unprecedented possibilities for conflicts. Trump declined to sell his holdings, instead announcing before he took office that he would turn his company over to his sons.

It was an attempt to assure the public that he was “completely isolating himself from his business interests,” in the words of his lawyer.

But in his first weeks in office, Trump has made little effort to maintain the appearance of keeping the family business at arm's length.

After Nordstrom dropped his daughter's clothing and accessories line, Trump tweeted angrily that Ivanka Trump had been “treated so unfairly” by Nordstrom, leaving the impression that the administration would use the bully pulpit to punish companies that sever ties with the family. Spokesman Sean Spicer accused the company of “a direct attack” on Trump's policies and his daughter's name. Finally, senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, in a televised interview from the White House, suggested that viewers of “Fox & Friends” should “go buy Ivanka's stuff.”

In a letter to the White House, the Office on Government Ethics said Conway's plug crossed a line. But it's the administration that will decide whether Conway, who got a mild rebuke from Spicer, will face more discipline. Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization responded to questions.

The Conway episode showed that Trump's indifference to questions of conflicts already was trickling down to his staff, said Paul Ryan, a lawyer for the progressive group Common Cause.

“We're supposed to trust that this president who has shown a disregard for these norms is going to enforce the rules against one of his closest staff persons,” he said. “Hopes aren't high.”

Even as controversy swirled over that dust-up, Trump was taking Abe for a golf weekend to his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, which Trump and his team have aggressively branded as the “winter White House” — and which doubled its membership fee to $200,000 after Trump was elected.

Facebook pictures of Trump's dining patio meeting with Abe were taken by a club member who joined after Trump's election and seemed taken with the access to power he was enjoying.

“HOLY MOLY !!!” Richard DeAgazio wrote on his Facebook page, posting photos of Trump and top aides poring over papers and speaking frantically with Abe. “Wow … the center of the action!!!”

Spicer said later that the officials were not viewing and shining cellphone lights on classified information but were reviewing logistics for a public statement about the nuclear test.

The episodes prompted Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who leads the House Oversight Committee, to write to the White House requesting numerous pieces of information, including the level of security vetting afforded to club members. Chaffetz already had requested an investigation of Conway's comments.

“Who knows? A waiter could be video-recording it,” said Representative Lois Frankel, a Democrat who represents Palm Beach, Florida, and has been to the club many times for fundraisers. “There's so much potential for mischief.”

Frankel conceded that Trump is new to the job and may be unaware of the risk, but nonetheless faulted his “cavalier attitude.”

Chaffetz and other members of Congress are under intense public pressure to take a harder line in overseeing Trump's business ties.

“I have a sense that what he was doing with Abe was showing off,” said Larry Noble, general counsel to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit government reform group. “I can't imagine he doesn't have private rooms and can't have a private dinner. Why would you take the prime minister of Japan to a [club] dining room? Who are you trying to impress?”

Painter said the imagery is only part of the value to Trump. Club members also know they might run into top administration officials over a drink or by the pool.

“It's pay for access. It's legal,” Painter said. “But it's terribly discouraging for ordinary voters to watch this happen.”

Taxpayers, meanwhile, are picking up some of the tab. Ric Bradshaw, the Palm Beach County sheriff, estimated local security costs at $60,000 for every day Trump spends in Palm Beach, independent of what the Secret Service and other federal agencies are spending. Bradshaw said he is seeking federal reimbursement.

Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is still facing conflict questions related to its hotel operations — starting with the one a few blocks from the White House. The Trump company leases the property from the General Services Administration, meaning that since he took office, Trump is, in effect, his own landlord. The GSA is now trying to decide whether the president is in violation of a clause in the lease that prohibits any federal official from benefiting from the deal.

The company has announced aggressive plans to expand throughout the United States, with a new hotel brand, Scion, a nod to the Trump family heritage, according to a news release. At a recent hotel industry conference in Los Angeles, Trump company executive Eric Danziger told the Wall Street Journal that the company had signed letters of intent with developers for 17 of the hotels, which are supposed to be geared toward a younger, trendier clientele than the family's old-school luxury brand.

In a common business model for the hotel industry, the Trump Organization would not build the hotels, but manage them and receive a fee for the brand name.

One of those potential partners is Mukemmel “Mike” Sarimsakci, a Dallas-based developer who grew up in Turkey and who considers Trump his business idol. He mentioned that to Turkish reporters, and they started calling him “the Turkish Trump”.

He wants to build Scion hotels in downtown Dallas and in St. Louis, though no deals have been signed.

Sarimsakci said most of the money for the Dallas venture would come from what he said are “friends and family” in Turkey and Kazakhstan.

“It's not a big group,” he said in an interview, declining to name the investors.

He said Turkish investors like the relative safety of U.S. real estate and wouldn't have an interest in trying to curry favor with Trump. “They're really just here to put money in for capital preservation, and make a little return on their money, and they're happy,” he said.

Trump has said that new deals won't be signed until an outside counsel clears them. The company hired Bobby Burchfield, a veteran Republican lawyer in Washington, to handle those ethics reviews. Both the company and Burchfield declined to comment on how those reviews will work, or whether they will include the source of financing as well as the company's development partners.

Ethics watchdogs say foreign investments in the hotels could be a huge concern, particularly because Trump also has declined to release his tax returns or much other information about the financing underpinning his business empire. If the investment is coming from a government-controlled entity, Ryan said, that could be a violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause that restricts U.S. officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments.

“The real story is how little we know,” he said. “We don't even know what we don't know about Trump's business holdings.”


• Noah Bierman covers the White House in Washington, D.C. for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the newspaper in 2015, he worked for The Boston Globe in both Boston and Washington, covering Congress, politics and transportation in the immediate aftermath of the Big Dig. He has also reported on higher education, crime, politics and local government for the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post and the Duluth (Minnesota) News-Tribune. Bierman is a native of Miami who attended Duke University.]

• Joseph Tanfani is an investigative reporter in the Washington, D.C., bureau, where he has written about campaign finance, gun policy and federal contracting. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2012, he worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a reporter and investigations editor, and at the Miami Herald, the Press of Atlantic City and the Williamsport Sun-Gazette.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • Trump hotels may be planning an expansion amid calls to divest

 • Tracking Trump: The first 100 days


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-business-20170217-story.html
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« Reply #6 on: July 26, 2017, 01:07:52 pm »

...another person who should be locked up🙄

Mike Hosking: Metiria Turei should know - knowledge of a crime is a crime itself

Comment by Mike Hosking

Metiria Turei has written another chapter in her increasingly depressing curriculum vitae.

Having confessed to lying and cheating a government department, she's now decided to play co-conspirator to those who have come forward and told her they're ripping off the system just like she did.

It would be easy to ignore this sort of behaviour if it wasn't for the fact this woman wants to run the country. She's not some attention seeking activist, she's potentially a senior cabinet minister.


You can say all you want about politics and its ability to sink to various lows. But in general, those who participate in the practice have a broad code of conduct - and deception, dishonesty, fraud and general illegality aren't part of it.

Being angry or frustrated about a system or finding things hard under a series of rules or regulations have never been, and please let them never become, acceptable reasons to become a crook. There is no doubt in my mind the original confession was designed for nothing more than political reasons, making her not only dishonest but an opportunist as well.

To expand that dishonesty to protecting other liars and cheats is an affront to (a) everyone who works and pays taxes and abides by the laws of the land and (b) more importantly every beneficiary who is in exactly the same position as Turei and her fellow thieves, but through hard work, diligence, and decency doesn't scam the system.

Having set a precedent, which this is, where does it stop?

For those who feel they pay too much tax, can they just keep a bit aside? Any interaction with a government department - whether it be the tax office, social welfare, the health system, or ACC - can we now set the rules we feel are appropriate? For all those who work hard and struggle to make ends meet, can we skip whatever payment we may need to make to the government because it's all a bit hard?

I am surprised the Greens have let this unfold the way it has.

Even if you had sympathy for the original confession - hard times many years ago, eventually put right, amends made - even if you could get past that, this latest chapter brings a whole new level or deceit to bear.

In other areas of life, knowledge of a crime is in fact a crime itself. For a party looking for increased credibility, looking to put the mad old days of Sue Bradford and Jeanette Fitzsimons and their social engineering craziness behind them, how can any of this possibly help?
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« Reply #7 on: July 26, 2017, 11:52:35 pm »


from The Southland Times....

It's good to be belittled

We exist by grace of the climate and we
forget it at our peril, Joe Bennett contends.


By JOE BENNETT | 5:00AM - Wednesday, July 25, 2017

Stormy weather. — Photograph: Mytchall Bransgrove/Fairfax NZ.
Stormy weather. — Photograph: Mytchall Bransgrove/Fairfax NZ.

I WRITE  on the morning after a storm. The thing you notice is the silence.

“This house has been far out to sea all night,” wrote Ted Hughes on a similar occasion, and his image captures the wildness of a storm, the lashing and the bucking, the sheer marine ferocity of it, when the world turns deafening, when it becomes a Turner painting with no distinction between land and sea and sky, when to take the dog for a walk is to dress like Scott of the Antarctic and to tighten the strings of the hood and to screw up your face like a raisin and to open the door and bend forward into the polar blast and to feel your very eyeballs assaulted and your skin raked, and to see the rain shifting in sheets across a darkened world and to step out hunched against it and to feel the wind driving you back, and to plug on drenched and streaming and to look round and find the dog isn't there. He's stayed inside.

Inside is lovely, is rich with the simplest luxuries: shelter, light, heat. The log burner is the glowing hearth of every house since time began. To look out of the window is to wonder how anything could endure out there. Yesterday beside the tunnel road, horses stood in paddocks without shelter, mute and battered, tarpaulins strapped over their backs, their regal heads bare and motionless in the hammering rain, their hooves sunk in mud, enduring.

A storm reminds us how fragile is the world we occupy, and how contingent we are.

If this storm had gone on for a week, for a month, how long before we'd have fallen apart? Few enough regions are habitable as it is. How easy it would be to lose others to perpetual storms, or intolerable heat, or creeping desert sands. For all our technological sophistication, we exist by grace of the climate and we forget it at our peril. A point entirely lost on Trump.

Trump, who in his own person manages to embody all that is worst in human nature — vanity, selfishness, cruelty, stupidity, ignorance, greed, dishonesty — loves to boast about American power.

He revels in military hardware, in aircraft carriers, in phallic missiles, in great black submarines. He calls them beautiful, sees them as projections of his own supposed virility.

Yet where was American power when Katrina struck, or Sandy? It lay curled in the bunker, whimpering. American power, all human power, is as nothing against the climate, is a trinket to be tossed aside.

Storms belittle us, and it is good to be belittled.

Shakespeare knew about storms. He sent King Lear out into one. Lear was an ageing bully, an angry tyrant, a narcissist driven mad by his daughters and awash with self-pity. He had ‘ever but slenderly known himself’. Out on the heath in the raging storm Lear's wits begin to turn. He starts to see how the world goes. For the first time he gives thought to the lowly of his kingdom.

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you…
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have taken…
Too little care of this.


And when the storm eventually abates, “I am a very foolish fond old man,” says Lear to his one true daughter. “If you have poison for me I will drink it.”

But Trump is no Lear. Trump hasn't the wit to gain self-knowledge. And though he pretends to cherish the poor white workers of America, and has ridden to power on their backs, he has no interest in them. He runs a cabinet of billionaires for the benefit of billionaires.

Yet he knows, by wordless instinct, that it can't last. He is already tweeting about pardons. He fears that someone will rat on him, and he's probably right. He who gives no loyalty won't get much.

And Trump is haunted by Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, the spare, lean FBI man who doesn't smile. Mueller is everything Trump is not. He is honest. He thinks before he speaks and he means what he says and he generally says nothing. That nothing terrifies Trump.

Trump has sent his whorish minions to dig dirt on Mueller. But you have only to look at Mueller's jaw, to know there's no dirt to be dug. He's Trump's nightmare. He's the conscience Trump never had.

How Trump will go down I don't know. But somehow somewhere he will. And people will wake to the morning after. And will notice the sweet silence. And will start to clean up.


Julian “Joe” Bennett is a writer and columnist living in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Born in England, Bennett emigrated to New Zealand when he was twenty nine.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/opinion/95070749
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Donald
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« Reply #8 on: July 27, 2017, 03:22:12 am »

We exist by luck....not grace in many ways..but good to see Joe at least trying to catch up😉....can't expect to much from a public servant...especiallly a teacher🙄

...heading to the popular island of Koh Samui tomorrow to look at investment property on behalf of a kiwi property company ...may be off the air for a while...so please make sure no lefties post crap while I ain't here....
...keep up the good work😉
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Having fun in the hills!


« Reply #9 on: July 27, 2017, 10:40:30 am »


The dog-shit I just scrapped off the sole of my shoe half-an-hour-ago had more personality and intelligence than you.
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« Reply #10 on: July 27, 2017, 12:03:52 pm »

Well you should be more careful where you shit🙄
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« Reply #11 on: September 16, 2017, 05:49:12 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Taxpayers billed $1,092 for an official's two-night stay
at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club


An invoice from the president's Palm Beach property surfaces, showing
that the government was charged for someone to spend the weekend.


By DREW HARWELL and AMY BRITTAIN | 12:01PM EDT - Friday, September 15, 2017

The Washington Post has obtained a March 2017 receipt for a two-night stay at Mar-a-Lago. Here's why it matters. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
The Washington Post has obtained a March 2017 receipt for a two-night stay at Mar-a-Lago. Here's why it matters.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


THE bedroom suites at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago club, available only to members and their guests, feature hand-painted Moorish ceilings, antique Spanish-tiled mosaics and sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean.

On a weekend in early March, during one of seven trips by Trump and his White House entourage to the posh Palm Beach property since the inauguration, the government paid the Trump-owned club to reserve at least one bedroom for two nights.

The charge, according to a newly disclosed receipt reviewed by The Washington Post, was $1,092.

The amount was based on a per-night price of $546, which, according to the bill, was Mar-a-Lago's “rack rate,” the hotel industry term for a standard, non-discounted price.

The receipt, which was obtained in recent days by the transparency advocacy group Property of the People and verified by The Post, offers one of the first concrete signs that Trump's use of Mar-a-Lago as the “Winter White House” has resulted in taxpayer funds flowing directly into the coffers of his private business.

Given the number of high-profile presidential events at Mar-a-Lago, questions about who pays for meals and rooms have generally gone unanswered. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited in February, the White House made a point of saying that Abe would stay at the club free of charge as a personal guest of Trump.

The March invoice was provided to the advocacy group by the Coast Guard in response to a broader Freedom of Information Act request seeking records on the agency's expenses related to Trump-affiliated properties. The Coast Guard FOIA office searched the agency’s credit card payment records, which led it to the invoice, according to an explanation provided by the agency.

The advocacy group has been filing records requests with the Trump administration through a project it calls Operation 45.

It is not clear whether the invoice stemmed from a one-time occurrence or represented one of many Mar-a-Lago rooms that have been booked at government expense for presidential aides or other officials since Trump took office and began traveling there on a regular basis. Other agencies that likely have had regular presence at the club, such as the Secret Service, have declined to provide The Post information about potential payments to Mar-a-Lago and have referred requests to the General Services Administration. The GSA told The Washington Post in March that it had no records of such payments.

The document from March does not reveal anything about the occupant beyond a note atop the page that reads: “National Security Council”.

White House officials and a Coast Guard spokeswoman, as well as representatives of the Trump Organization and Mar-a-Lago, did not respond to questions, including whether Trump's company regularly charges the government for members of his traveling party to stay at the club.




Now, some ethics experts say the government payment to Mar-a-Lago raises concerns about the domestic emoluments clause, which was intended to prevent the president from receiving payments beyond his salary from state or federal governments.

In addition, some questioned why the federal government should pay top dollar for luxury Palm Beach lodging when less expensive options are available nearby.

“The choice to stay there and have the government pay the $546-a-night rate seems imprudent,” said Kathleen Clark, a Washington University law professor who specializes in ethics issues. “If it were not owned by the president, it would still seem problematic. The fact that it's owned by the president makes it doubly problematic.”

Mar-a-Lago has long been one of the signature pieces of Trump's corporate empire.

The estate, which he bought in 1985 and later converted to a private club, includes two swimming pools, five red-clay tennis courts, the Trump Salon and the Trump Spa, as well as banquet facilities that host elaborate charity balls and weddings.

The business has experienced changes since Trump won the presidency. Soon after the election, the club doubled its initiation fee to $200,000, returning the amount to its pre-recession level. After Trump's sharp rhetoric on immigration and race in recent months, a number of regular charity customers have opted to move their banquets elsewhere.

Trump's frequent trips there have come at an expense to taxpayers. The Coast Guard's increased costs to protect the waterfront property with round-the-clock patrols and gun-mounted boats have been widely publicized.

Financial disclosures filings show that Mar-a-Lago is 99 percent owned by Trump's revocable trust, from which the president can withdraw money at any time. The club made $37 million in resort-related revenue from January 2016 to this April.

On the weekend that the government paid for the room, March 3rd and 4th, Trump was joined by a large retinue of administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then-chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who has since become Trump's chief of staff.

On that Saturday, Trump presided over a security briefing, dined with top officials from his administration and mingled with guests in the hallway outside a charity fundraiser for the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.

The question of whether the president's company can profit directly from the government is raised in an emoluments lawsuit that was filed by an ethics watchdog group in January.

Much of the attention to the case has focused on the Constitution's ban on foreign “emoluments” and the business practices of Trump's Washington hotel. The Constitution also states that the U.S. president “shall not receive … any other emolument” from the United States other than his fixed salary.

Trump has said the suit is without merit, and his company has pledged to donate profits from foreign countries to the U.S. Treasury. His attorney, Sheri Dillon, has said that transactions such as hotel room payments are “arm's-length” transactions that would not amount to an “emolument”.

Oral arguments are scheduled for the suit next month in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“The fact that government officials would spend tax dollars at the president's property raises serious constitutional questions under the domestic emoluments clause,” said Brianne Gorod, chief counsel with the Constitutional Accountability Center, a nonprofit Washington think tank.

Jed Shugerman, a Fordham University law professor, said that the founding founders clearly viewed attempts to curry favor from the president as a serious issue. But Shugerman said a reasonable argument could be made that emoluments would need a minimum value to qualify as a clear benefit.

“You have to make a leap from what was on the page in the 18th century to what is meant in the 21st century,” he said. “History answers some of these questions more clearly than others. History does not clearly answer this question.”


• Drew Harwell is a national business reporter at The Washington Post,

• Amy Brittain is a reporter for The Washington Post's investigative team.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Watchdog groups requested Mar-a-Lago visitor logs. They finally got 22 names.

 • 17th charity cancels its event at President Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, blaming ‘political turbulence’

 • Two plaintiffs join suit against Trump, alleging breach of emoluments clause


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/taxpayers-billed-1092-for-an-officials-two-night-stay-at-trumps-mar-a-lago-club/2017/09/15/e3e5dfdc-97c6-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html
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« Reply #12 on: September 16, 2017, 05:57:29 pm »

...why must all Clintons be liars🙄


Chelsea Clinton tweets false story claiming Michigan passed bill allowing EMTs to deny gay patients treatment

Chelsea Clinton falsely tweeted Friday that the Michigan House of Representatives had voted to allow emergency medical providers choice in treating patients, specifically giving EMTs the option to deny treatment to gay patients.

"Absolutely appalling," the former First Daughter tweeted, "Michigan House Passed Bill Allowing EMTs To Refuse Treatment To Gay People."

The story Clinton cited was from a website for the LGBT New Now Next Awards, and was posted in 2014. When followers pointed out the story was old, Clinton deleted her tweet.

Not only was the story old, but the actual premise was deeply flawed. What the Michigan House actually passed was a garden variety Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which would have exempted religious individuals from laws that infringed on their religious beliefs.

Like most state RFRAs, the Michigan bill contained a clause that allows the state to infringe on religious beliefs when there's a "compelling government interest." The preservation of human life is widely considered to qualify, according to legal experts.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.
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